The General's Bombshell
What Happened When I Called for Phasing Out the U.S. Nuclear Arsenal

By George Lee Butler

Sunday, January 12 1997; Page C01
The Washington Post

At the National Press Club in early December, I gave an
intensely personal expression of my views on the case for the
elimination of nuclear weapons. I hoped to convey the
growing sense of alarm that I had felt over the course of my
long experience in the nuclear arena -- including my tenure as
commander in chief of the U.S. Strategic Command, which
controls all Navy and Air Force nuclear weapons -- and how
this has now evolved to a singular goal: to bend every effort,
within my power and authority, to promote the conditions and
attitudes that might someday free mankind from the scourge of
nuclear weapons.

As I survey the response of what appears to be a rather
astonished world, I am by turns encouraged, disappointed
and dismayed.

Encouraged, by the flood of supportive calls and letters I have
received from every corner of the planet because the issue has
now been widely joined, with great interest and intensity, and
because I can discern the makings of an emerging global
consensus that the risks posed by nuclear weapons far
outweigh their presumed benefits.

Disappointed, thus far, by the quality of the debate, by those
pundits who simply sniffed imperiously at the goal of
elimination, aired their stock Cold War rhetoric, hurled a
personal epithet or two and settled smugly back into their
world of exaggerated threats and bygone enemies. And by
critics who attacked my views by misrepresenting them, such
as suggesting that I am proposing unilateral disarmament or a
pace of reduction that would jeopardize the security of the
nuclear-weapon states.

And finally, dismayed that, even among more serious
commentators, the lessons of 50 years at the nuclear brink
can still be so grievously misread; that the assertions and
assumptions underpinning an era of desperate threats and
risks prevail unchallenged; that a handful of nations cling to the
impossible notion that the power of nuclear weapons is so
immense their use can be threatened with impunity, yet their
proliferation contained.

Albert Einstein recognized this hazardous but very human
tendency many years ago, when he warned that "the
unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our
modes of thinking, and thus we drift toward unparalleled
catastrophe." How else to explain the assertion that nuclear
weapons will infallibly deter major war, in a world that
survived the Cuban missile crisis in 1962 no thanks to
deterrence, but only by the grace of God? How else to accept
the proposition that any civilized nation would respond to the
act of a madman by adopting his methods? How otherwise to
fathom a historical view that can witness the collapse of
communism but fail to imagine a world rid of nuclear
weapons? Or finally, to account for the assumption that
because we are condemned to live with the knowledge of
how to fabricate nuclear weapons, we are powerless to
mount a global framework of verification and sanctions that
will greatly reduce the likelihood or adequately deal with the
consequences of cheating in a world free of nuclear weapons?

Many well-meaning friends have counseled me that by
championing elimination I risk setting the bar too high,
providing an easy target for the cynical and diverting attention
from the more immediately achievable. My response is that
elimination is the only defensible goal, and that goal matters
enormously. All of the declared nuclear-weapon states are
formally committed to nuclear abolition in the letter and the
spirit of the nonproliferation treaty, which went into effect in
1970 and was renewed last year. Every president of the
United States since Dwight Eisenhower has publicly endorsed
elimination. A clear and unequivocal commitment to
elimination, sustained by concrete policy and measurable
milestones, is essential to give credibility and substance to this
long-standing rhetorical position.

Such a commitment goes far beyond simply seizing the moral
high ground. It shifts the locus of policy attention from
numbers to the security climate essential to permit successive
reductions. It conditions government at all levels to create and
respond to every opportunity for shrinking arsenals, cutting
infrastructure and curtailing modernization. It sets the stage for
rigorous enforcement of nonproliferation regimes and
unrelenting pressures to reduce nuclear arsenals on a global
basis.

No one is more conscious than I am that realistic prospects
for elimination will evolve over many years. I was in the public
arena for too long ever to make the perfect the enemy of the
good. I hasten to add, however, my strong conviction that we

are far too timorous in imagining the good; we are still too
rigidly conditioned by an arms control mentality deeply rooted
in the Cold War. We fall too readily into the intellectual trap
of judging the goal of elimination against current political
conditions. We forget too quickly how seemingly intractable
conflicts can suddenly yield under the weight of reason or with
a change of leadership. We have lost sight too soon that, in
the blink of a historical eye, the world we knew for a
traumatic half-century has been utterly transformed.

Two days after taking charge of the Strategic Air Command
in 1991, I called together my senior staff of 20 generals and
one admiral and, over the course of what I am sure for all of
them was a mystifying and deeply unsettling discussion, I
presented my case that with the end of the Cold War, SAC's
mission was essentially complete. I began to prepare them for
a dramatic shift in strategic direction, to think in terms of less
rather than more, to argue for smaller forces, fewer targets,
reduced alert postures and accelerated arms control
agreements.

This was a wrenching adjustment that prompted angry debate,
bruised feelings and the early termination of a dozen promising
careers. But in the end, my staff unanimously supported my
decision to recommend that SAC itself be disestablished after
46 years at the nuclear ramparts.

But even this was only a beginning. My own prescription for
what the United States should do now is detailed in the report
of the Canberra Commission on the Elimination of Nuclear
Weapons, established by the government of Australia in
1995, on which I served. The commission called not just for
reductions in arms, but more importantly, for immediate,
multilateral negotiations toward ending the most regrettable
and risk-laden operational practice of the Cold War era: land-
and sea-based ballistic missiles standing nuclear alert. But
thoughtful debate about alternative agendas, while both urgent
and essential, is not the most important priority for the
American people.

What matters more is the defining question upon which the
debate must ultimately turn: How should the United States see
its responsibility for dealing with the conflicted moral legacy of
the Cold War? Russia, with its history of authoritarian rule and
a staggering burden of social transformation, is ill equipped to
lead on this issue. It falls unavoidably to us to work painfully
back through the tangled moral web of this frightful 50-year
gantlet, born of the hellish confluence of two unprecedented
historical currents: the bipolar collision of ideology and the
unleashing of the power of the atom.

As a democracy, the consequences of these cataclysmic
forces confronted us with a tortuous and seemingly
inextricable dilemma: how to put at the service of our national
survival a weapon whose sheer destructiveness was
antithetical to the very values upon which our society was
based? Over time, as arsenals multiplied on both sides and the
rhetoric of mutual annihilation grew more heated, we were
forced to think about the unthinkable, justify the unjustifiable,
rationalize the irrational. Ultimately, we contrived a new and
desperate theology to ease our moral anguish, and we called it
deterrence.

I spent much of my military career serving the ends of
deterrence, as did millions of others. I want very much to
believe that it was the nuclear force that I and others
commanded and operated that prevented World War III and
created the conditions leading to the collapse of the Soviet
empire. But, in truth, I do not and I cannot know that it was.
It will be decades before the hideously complex era of the
Cold War is adequately understood, with its bewildering
interactions of human fears and inhuman technology.

It would not matter much that informed assessments are still
well beyond our intellectual reach -- except for the crucial and
alarming fact that we continue to espouse deterrence as if it
were now an infallible panacea. And worse, other nations are
listening, have converted to our theology, are building their
arsenals, are poised to rekindle the nuclear arms race -- and
to reawaken the specter of nuclear war.

What a stunning, perverse turn of events. In the words of my
friend, Jonathan Schell, we face the dismal prospect that "The
Cold War was not the apogee of the age of nuclear weapons,
to be succeeded by an age of nuclear disarmament. Instead, it
may well prove to have simply been a period of initiation, in
which not only Americans and Russians, but Indians and
Pakistanis, Israelis and Iraqis, were adapting to the horror of
threatening the deaths of millions of people, were learning to
think about the unthinkable. If this is so, will history judge that
the Cold War proved only a sort of modern-day Trojan
Horse, whereby nuclear weapons were smuggled into the life
of the world, made an acceptable part of the way the world

works? Surely not, surely we still comprehend that to threaten
the deaths of tens of hundreds of millions of people presages
an atrocity beyond anything in the record of mankind? Or
have we, in a silent and incomprehensible moral revolution,
come to regard such threats as ordinary -- as normal and
proper policy for any self-respecting nation."

This cannot be the moral legacy of the Cold War. And it is
our responsibility to ensure that it will not be.

This article was adapted from a speech Butler gave at the
Henry L. Stimson Center in Washington last week.

About Gen. Butler

A 1961 graduate of the U.S. Air Force Academy, George
Lee Butler served in numerous flying and staff positions before
becoming the director for strategic plans and policy for the
Joint Chiefs of Staff. In January 1991 Butler attained the rank
of general and became the commander in chief of the
Strategic Air Command and subsequently commander in chief
of the U.S. Strategic Command, located at Offutt Air Force
Base in Nebraska. In these jobs he helped in the revision of
U.S. nuclear war-fighting plans. He was a candidate to
succeed Colin Powell as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
in 1994 but was not selected. He retired in February 1994 at
the age of 54.